The project uses a wheel of luminous paper as the display surface. This has a glow-in-the-dark quality to it which can be charged up using a bright light source. In this case a UV laser diode was used. This is perhaps the best possible source as its intensity will allow for very quick charging. The innovation here is the use of a second disk as a stencil. Look closely in the image above and you will see that the laser diode is mounted perpendicular to the display surface itself. A mirror reflects — and we believe slightly spreads — the laser dot. It then passes through a cut-out on the black wheel which is shaped as the desired character. As you can see in the video after the break, this results in a crisp and clear glowing letter.

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17 thoughts on “Laser charged glowing display”

This is fact amazing,you (in general) can also “print” horizontially in a square piece and instead of a roller with letters use something like an LCD behind the glow element and reduce the size of the whole thing… Hmmm,this is giving me ideas!!!

A laser printer is already designed to shine high resolution patterns the width of a sheet of paper at high speeds. You’d just have to modify it to shine the light on the paper instead of the toner drum.

The other problem is the laser is probably the wrong wavelength for the application.

Nice, using a stencil might work
for photoresist PCB etchers as well.
I tried to make one a while back
but was stuck by the slowness of
the plotting- using stencils could
get around the problem entirely.